An eloquent way to get related *and* unrelated models

[kohenkatz]

I have models Organization and Feature, with a belongsToMany relationship between them (i.e. an organization has multiple features, and a feature can be used by multiple organizations).

I am being asked for a simple "list of all features, indicating which of those features are enabled for the given organization."

One of my coworkers used the following query to do it:

SELECT
    f.id,
    f.friendly_name,
    of.id IS NOT NULL AS enabled
FROM features f
LEFT OUTER JOIN organization_features of
    ON f.id = of.feature_id AND of.organization_id=?
ORDER BY 1;

I'm trying to figure out if there is a more "Laravel-style" way to write this.

Obviously I can just translate this query to use the query builder, but is there a better way?

[macropay-solutions]

List of all features does not depend on the organisations so why the need to link it? You can use the append.

in your model

/**
 * called via $this->append(['allFeatures'])
 */
public function getAllFeaturesAttribute(): array
{
    return Feature::query()->all(); // which you can extract into a function that is caching them .
}

https://laravel.com/docs/10.x/eloquent-collections#method-append

[shaedrich]

Having a model attribute that queries a collection, feels wrong

[kohenkatz]

Thanks, but that doesn't really answer the question - it's not any different that doing separate queries for the features table and the features_organizations table and then putting tother the result in the view. It's still two separate queries.

The point of the question is about if there's a nicer way to do a single query like the SQL query that is shown.

[macropay-solutions]

Then you can create a new BelongsToMany class that extends Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsToMany and overwrite the performJoin method

/**
 * Set the join clause for the relation query.
 *
 * @param  \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Builder|null  $query
 * @return $this
 */
protected function performJoin($query = null)
{
    $query = $query ?: $this->query;

    // We need to join to the intermediate table on the related model's primary
    // key column with the intermediate table's foreign key for the related
    // model instance. Then we can set the "where" for the parent models.
    $query->join(
        $this->table,
        $this->getQualifiedRelatedKeyName(),
        '=',
        $this->getQualifiedRelatedPivotKeyName(),
        'outer' // see here
    );

    return $this;
}

You can add select and order in that relation.(try without them first)

[macropay-solutions]

@shaedrich any relation is a query in model when eager loading anyway.

[shaedrich]

@macropay-solutions Yeah, but not an attribute. I suppose, you're mixing concepts here.